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NASA's New Ejector Seat Borrows Tech From Yesterday's Apollo Program
Posted by Jack Loftus at 6:00 AM on November 24, 2008
If something goes wrong with the upcoming space shuttle replacement program, and we hope it does not, this is what could save the astronauts' lives. As they hurtle hundreds of miles per hour into the heavens, and their ship begins to break apart, mission control will scream "ABORT!" (or perhaps something a bit more technical), and the astronauts will be ejected from the capsule with a force that's actually much greater than the g's they'll experience during launch.
Virgin Mobile USA is soon to launch its first handset that uses tech from newly acquired Helio. Just as 
The USAF and Boeing will launch the X-37B--the first military orbital space plane if you discount the secret military shuttle--on top of an Atlas V rocket in November. They want to test its flying features in space and during atmospheric reentry. And probably its anti-matter rays and nuclear bays and hyperspace engines too (but of course, they are never going to tell you that). However, there seems to be a conflict with the civilian space program which may push one of the Moon exploration missions to 2009.
NASA has put a final date on the shuttle program: May 31 2010. That day, the shuttle will launch for the last time, putting an end to 29 years of amazing missions, two of them with tragic endings. The final will be STS-133, in which Endeavour "will carry critical spare components that will be placed on the outside of the station," including new communication antennas, a gas tank, spare parts for 
Here's a small form factor PC by Shuttle meant to function as a media server. What's clever is the 7-inch touchscreen and I hope some general UI for getting around your files and programs. I've stashed a Shuttle box or two in a closet, and it fit great but using a keyboard and mouse in the closet is rough. So is planting a monitor between your shirts and pants. So this is a nice idea. (Please ignore the photoshopped floating screenshots to the sides of the LCD.) [
It's taken four and a half years, but the data recovery specialists charged with extracting data from a cracked, charred 400MB Seagate drive aboard the ill-fated Space Shuttle Columbia have done their duty, retrieving 99% of the information written to the disk. The Columbia burned up on re-entry on Feb. 1, 2003, over Louisiana and Texas. Computerworld reports that the drive was found in a dry lakebed and handed to a team at Kroll Ontrack about six months after the tragedy, but the successful recovery has only just come to light. So, you ask, what was on the drive that was so important?
A US$99 PC obviously isn't going to deliver a blockbuster experience, but Shuttle's toaster-sized KPC actually has the hardware to get the lightweight job done: 1.8GHz Celeron processor, 512MB RAM and an 80GB hard drive, all of which is expandable. Overall, Tom's Hardware thought the cheap-o box delivered "surprisingly good" performance and value, except for the default OS Foresight Linux—its user-unfriendliness and bugs are the KPC's biggest problems. But, the Windows XP install "worked flawlessly" in case you've got an extra copy lying around and want a low-power mini-PC. [
This prototype tube amp and PC combo from Shuttle (pictured at right) and ESTI (on the left) is fancy enough to call itself the Digital Video Opera (DVO) series. Don't be fooled by its old-school tubes, though, because when you team up these two tube-spangled boxes in the home theater, you get a Vista-running system with HDMI, 7.1 channel DTS, built-in Wi-Fi and a remote control.
You can't see in the pictures, but it has a front-mounted Vacuum Fluorescent Display (VFD) that really sells its tubular style. We're assuming that each unit is available in either black or silver so they actually do match each other, but neither company is talking about when we might see this pretty pair available in the real world, or at what price. 
